On the Sunday morning talk shows this week, Sen. John McCain offered a grim outlook on what the Libyan conflict may look like in weeks to come.
Senator John McCain warned on Sunday that he feared the conflict in Libya was heading toward a “stalemate” and threatened to create a vacuum that could result in Al Qaeda gaining control of the North African country. Speaking from Cairo, Mr. McCain, a strong advocate of intervention in Libya, also said that Al Qaeda could take advantage of an encroaching stalemate as a tenacious Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi continued to cling to power.
“I really fear a stalemate,” said Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona, speaking on CNN television’s “State of the Union” program after visiting the rebel strongholds in Libya. He said the rebel fighters were “badly outgunned in armor, in equipment, in training” against forces loyal to Col. Qaddafi.
The predictions of Mr. McCain, a seasoned statesman with years of accumulated foreign policy experience, are not to be taken lightly. If there is no significant policy change on the part of NATO or the United States, Libya will become another failed state – with great likelihood that the emergent regime will be hostile to the national security and foreign policy interests of the US. McCain’s assertions can be easily substantiated – Al Qaeda will seek to take advantage of chaos and instability in Libya, as experts believe they have close ties to Libyan rebels; their North African affiliate has already endorsed the rebels’ cause and they clearly have interests in the region.
As the old adage goes, the enemy of our enemy is supposedly our friend. So why aren’t we acting like it? Simply put, we have no way of knowing whether the rebels are going to support democratic governance once Gaddhafi has been overthrown. In any situation like this, there is no way of knowing what will happen when the power dynamic shifts so significantly. In an ideal world, U.S. aid to the rebels in Libya would go far beyond a mere $25 million in non-lethal military surplus and half-hearted statements of support for the rebels’ military cause qualified with a reluctance to supply real military power to the rebels and a passing of the buck, saying “somebody else should do that.”
As we know, however, our world is far from ideal. Now that the Obama Administration has made the idealistic error of engaging in the Libyan intervention, the United States must not be embarrassed by the North African state’s potential devolution into chaos and instability. We cannot profess to fight a global war on terror while enabling Al Qaeda and other entities hostile to U.S. interests to take advantage of situations we have created as a result of our failure to follow through on our actions. So, what to do now? Given the nuances of the domestic political situation, the fiscal, social, and moral imperatives against putting troops on the ground, and the international restrictions on going beyond the enforcement of a no-fly zone, there are two options.
First, the United States can step back, hold our European allies responsible for resolving the situation in Libya in our best interest, continue to refuse arming the rebels, and continue to pretend that Gaddhafi’s ouster is not the ultimate objective. This option would be fatal to United States interests and contrary to President Obama’s five stated foreign policy goals of ending the war in Iraq responsibly, finishing the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban, securing all nuclear weapons and materials from terrorists and rogue states, achieving true energy security, and rebuilding our alliances to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Or we could take a stand and act like the United States again. Not only does the President contradict himself when he pretends Gaddhafi’s ouster is not the ultimate objective,
Our duty and our mandate under U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973 is to protect civilians, and we are doing that. It is not to remove Qaddafi by force. But it is impossible to imagine a future for Libya with Qaddafi in power…It is unthinkable that someone who has tried to massacre his own people can play a part in their future government.
but harboring the illusion that the United States is playing only a supporting role in Libya is preposterous. The U.S. and NATO need to drop the political pretenses and embrace the challenge that winning in Libya entails; if this doesn’t happen, it will only contribute to a muddling of the ultimate objective and increased international confusion.
We shouldn’t be in Libya in the first place; we’re not the world police and there was no vital U.S. national security interest being threatened by Col. Gaddhafi’s actions, nor were his abominable actions an “emerging threat” to our nation. While many made the argument that a moral obligation existed to intervene for humanitarian reasons, this is an arbitrary standard – why did we not intervene in southern Sudan, or Rwanda, or the countless other potential humanitarian crises around the globe? However, regardless of the motivations behind our behavior, now that Mr. Obama has made the decision to intervene, we need to see a definitive resolution of the Libyan intervention in favor of the United States. It’s been a month, and we have almost nothing to show for the enormous amount of military resources expended and time committed to the Libyan effort. So let’s fight this war to win – even in our idealism-free world and without using ground troops, the rebels can be armed, the U.N. mandate can be broken, and Gaddhafi and his administration can be strategically targeted. Though we don’t know whether offering military support to the rebels will come back to haunt us in the future, we have no choice but to take our chances and monitor arms distribution exceptionally carefully in order to defeat the Gaddhafi regime. As Gen. Colin Powell would assert, while we shouldn’t be fighting in Libya, now that we’re at war, we need to use every resource and tool to exert decisive force against the enemy. Even when we’re operating within the political and practical confines of “no ground troops,” there is much more that we should be doing.
Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Senator McCain, a strong proponent for the Libyan intervention, warned of possible Al Qaeda takeover of an unstable Libya in the event of a “stalemate,” which raises the question: are our leaders doing everything to ensure that a stalemate in Libya doesn’t occur? Clearly, the answer is no. Our leaders need to take an active role in ensuring that the U.S. intervention in Libya achieves its objectives and that we follow through on it completely. We have historical experience in arming rebels, and we know what works and what doesn’t. Let’s see this through to the end; yes, it will be a costly investment, but the outcome will certainly be better than the potential alternative of an Al Qaeda-controlled Libya. It will be politically costly for members of Congress, and especially so for the Obama Administration – which may be the unfortunate reason we won’t see a successful resolution to this conflict at all. In this case, the pathway to peace is paved with bricks of war. That is the price we pay when we engage in an only half-justifiable foreign military intervention motivated by idealism. Now that we’re involved in Libya, let’s put aside narrow domestic political considerations and act like we know how to win. If we don’t, the specter of stalemate Mr. McCain has raised might just become real – and that is utterly unacceptable.
Photo Credit: AFP/Getty Images
Note from Rajiv – Check out my colleagues’ insightful posts on the Libyan intervention:
Paul Schied on Libya and American Leadership
Naji Filali on American Interventionism